Free Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan by Phillip Lopate

understand it that way was probably Alfred Kazin, who penned a 1986 essay called “The Harbor Is My New York.” Can you imagine a young writer-about-town using that title today?
    The Harbor (1915) is a Bildungsroman about a young man, Billy, who grows up above the Brooklyn waterfront, overlooking “a harbor that to me was strange and terrible,” with its “sweaty, hairy dockers and saloons.” His father owns a warehouse on the docks, and by Oedipal extension Billy identifies everything that is patriarchal, brutal, and materialistic with the harbor. “From that day the harbor became for me a big grim place to be let alone—like my father. A place immeasurably stronger than I—like my father—and like him harsh and indifferent.” His ex-schoolteacher mother, who “had come to hate the harbor,” encourages Billy toward idealism and the finer things in life. At the same time, he is drawn to the ragged waterfront kids, and mesmerized by the sight of “a big fat girl half dressed, giggling and queer, quite drunk” who seems to represent the life-force at its greasiest and sexiest. Later, leaving no metaphor untried, Billy says, “I was a toy piano. And the harbor was a giant who played on me till I rattled inside.”
    Poole works the harbor symbolism so painstakingly that there is scarcely room for the characters to come alive. Though the novel has its moments, it's not a great book. I read it twice, wanting desperately to find a lost masterpiece, so that I could rediscover and defend the neglected Ernest Poole. As it happens, he writes with florid enthusiasm, like a poor man's O. Henry or John Reed, in a boy-scoutish style (trying not to get ahead of his character's naïveté) that has aged badly. Still, I find intriguing its one-track-mind fascination with the New York harbor as an indomitable juggernaut that can never be stilled—especially since it has been stilled.
    * In 1910 the U.S. Treasury Department, for purposes of customs law, established its demarcations as “including all the territory lying within the corporate limits of the cities of Greater New York and Yonkers, N.Y., and of Jersey City, N.J., and in addition thereto all the waters and shores of the Hudson River and Kill von Kill in the State of New Jersey from a point opposite Fort Washington to Bergen Point Light and all the waters and shores of Newark Bay and the Hackensack River lying within Hudson County, N.J., from Bergen Point Light to the limits of Jersey City.” This area had a waterfront of 771 miles, of which 362 miles were developed with 852 piers. Manhattan alone had a developed waterfront (measuring the area around the piers) of about 76 miles.
    IN 1915, THE SAME YEAR The Harbor appeared, the Russell Sage Foundation published Charles B. Barnes's The Longshoremen, probably the first in-depth study ever done of American dockworkers. The author's sympathy for the men he studied was apparent. Conveying with statistics and sober prose the dangerous, unremitting working conditions these men endured, Barnes reported that a longshoreman handled about three thousand pounds per hour, that the heavy lifting led frequently to hernias and muscular exhaustion, that the pressure to load or unload ships as rapidly as possible resulted in crews working thirty to forty hours straight, and that the ensuing fatigue increased the chances of accident.
    Cargoes would swing through the air, barely missing men's heads, steel cables swayed precariously in the wind, a hundred competing noises distracted the focus, buckets of coal were dumped with a roar, releasing clouds of dust. At night the dangers increased, because of lowered visibility and the buildup of fatigue, and along with them came a curious indifference to personal safety, the men having successfully dodged so many close scrapes already. But however invulnerable a longshoreman might come to feel, virtually none were spared some incapacitating injury in the course of their careers. “One man who